[upjbapod] Ubuntu breaks access to the Lenovo recovery partition

Installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" 32-bit to dual boot onto a Lenovo X230 Thinkpad preinstalled with Windows 7 Professional. Using the least effort partitioning in the Ubuntu Desktop installer (no advanced partitioning, just the slider to select partition sizes) causes losing access to the Rescue and Recovery (I don't know if it's called that anymore) boot choice, and therefore the Factory Reinstall capability. The partitions still exist (/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda3), but there is no longer "F11 to recover your system" on the Startup Interrupt Menu after pressing "Enter" on the boot screen. There is a "F10 to diagnose hardware" option; I don't remember if it was there before, but it does not go to the sophisticated recovery software.

More mysteriously, there is a "Windows Recovery Environment (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" choice in GRUB, but selecting it boots regular Windows 7, same as selecting the"Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda2)" option. Grub's grub.cfg, excerpted below, seems to point to different partitions, but they both end up booting the same regular Windows 7.

I suspect it was a mistake to allow GRUB to overwrite the MBR.

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
menuentry "Windows Recovery Environment (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" --class windows --class os {
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod ntfs
        set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root BAFC8CE9FC8CA16D
        drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
        chainloader +1
}
menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda2)" --class windows --class os {
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod ntfs
        set root='(hd0,msdos2)'
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root EAF88F23F88EED5F
        chainloader +1
}
### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###

Update: created DVD recovery disks. Reinstalled from DVD (confirming that the DVDs work). Still no F11, but Linux is gone. Installed Linux, completely blowing away all windows. Reinstalled from DVD again. F11 is back!

Update 2: How to Dual Boot Windows 7 and Linux using BCDEdit (instead of EasyBCD which costs money for commercial use). Open problem: the BOOTSECTOR that BCD will use is only a copy. How can I know if GRUB writes a newer, better BOOTSECTOR to /dev/sda5, which needs to get manually copied to c:\linux.bin ?